Terry McGrath, a 79-year-old Irish American, is a borscht-belt comic. Well, sort of. The borscht belt doesn't exist anymore and McGrath doesn't pretend to be a Henny Youngman or Buddy Hackett facsimile. Nevertheless, he has mastered the Yiddish inflections and cadences and his act is peppered with Yiddishisms. It's all very affectionate, and McGrath, a former New Jersey educator, has enjoyed a 20-year run with Jewish audiences in synagogues, community centers, and retirement villages, along with the more heterogeneous audiences at hotels and clubs of one kind or another.
Still, the demand for his act is on the wane, and his experiences are not unlike those of other old-school comics who have their roots, at least in part, in the now-moribund borscht belt. Equally uniting these senior comics, they are not household names and were never stars (and never will be), yet they have managed to make a living over the decades doing their shtick in venues across the country.
The borscht belt—also known as "the mountains," a string of predominantly Jewish resort hotels in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York—was the launching pad for such stars as Alan King, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, Jerry Lewis, Buddy Hackett, and Jackie Mason. The latter still makes star appearances and earns big bucks for his efforts. And then there are the somewhat lesser-known comics who also headline, including Freddie Roman, Charlie Callas, and Mal Z. Lawrence.
Clearly, the whole scene has changed, audiences have evolved, and comics—especially the older ones who've been at it for the long haul—have been forced to rethink their bits, persona, and one-liners, as well as the assumptions their audiences allegedly hold dear. (If few people now believe that an unmarried 29-year-old daughter is an emotional burden, how many jokes can you crack about your unwed 29-year-old daughter?)
Indeed, as McGrath and other comics tell it, they're frequently reinventing themselves from hotel to hotel, if not from night to night. Audience demographics are simply all over the map today.
"At one time you knew who was going to be in front of you," McGrath says. "In the Catskills, for example, you assumed you'd be performing for elderly Jews. Mature Jewish audiences are still there, of course. But there are also families with children, and they're not necessarily Jewish at all. At the Concorde Hotel, I've performed for conventions of Chinese, Poles, and cops. Even among Jews there are tremendous variations in response. Orthodox Jews have a whole different sense of humor from secular Jews and many don't laugh at all. A lot of the elderly Jews who had their roots in Lower East Side culture have died. Many of those that remain don't know Yiddish and, if you throw Yiddish words in, they don't know what you're talking about."
And they don't necessarily grow misty-eyed when McGrath throws in an old musical chestnut like "Yiddishe Mama" for good measure. McGrath is a recognized expert on Jewish humor and much of his comedy is placed in the context of a lecture: "Jewish Humor 101."
Jeff Krolick, the entertainment director at the Nevele Grande Resort & Country Club, one of the few remaining hotels in the Catskills, describes McGrath as "the Garrison Keiller of Jewish comedy."
Indeed, McGrath has lectured at the International Conference on Jewish Humor (sponsored by Tel Aviv University), at New School University in New York, and at many elder hostels.
In addition to talking with McGrath, Back Stage interviewed standup comics Van Harris and Stewie Stone to find out something about their working lives in the Catskills, in Florida, and on the road. Harris and Stone are not unlike Freddie Roman or Mal Z. Lawrence in terms of their comic worldview and their shared audience. Still, the questions remain: Who exactly are these comics? How do they do what they do? What are their challenges today? And how has the scene changed?
An Employment Dip
The major change is loss of work, all agree. There are just fewer gigs across the board. Harris recalls the time when there were an estimated "400 hotels and bungalow colonies in the Catskills alone. Now there are just a handful of Catskill hotels."
Outside the Catskills, there once were endless conventions where comics plied their trade. And there were the glitzy nightclubs, which have largely disappeared. Admittedly, comedy clubs have replaced them, but comedy clubs remain alien places to most old-line comics, who have a different sensibility and audience than their younger counterparts.
"In our heyday—the '50s and '60s—it was not uncommon to do five performances a week in five different cities," says Harris. "We'd do breakfast shows, luncheon shows, and stag shows. And then there were the Christmas shows. I was able to support my wife and four kids as a standup comic. Now weeks may go by where I don't work at all. If you do two performances in any given week, you're doing very well."
And despite the roll-of-the-dice randomness that has always defined a career in show business, there once seemed to be a series of steppingstones for standup comics that is now absent, according to the old guard. A comic's career was not unlike a baseball player's career, comments Stone. "You would start in the minor leagues and then go on to the major leagues.
"In the '60s and '70s, a beginning standup comic would work in the smaller clubs in Long Island and New York City," he continues. "Then, if you were successful, you could move on to the Playboy Club, get an agent, and then play the Copacabana. That would be followed by appearances in the legitimate clubs in all the major cities, each of which had a major nightclub or two.
"The next step was teaming up with stars at the large arenas, like the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island or the Shady Grove in Washington. And then there were the legitimate hotel rooms in Vegas where you could work a month at a time, seven days a week, two shows a night. It was constant work. Now you're lucky if you do Westbury for one performance, four performances at Foxwoods in Connecticut, and two days at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City."
Harris talks about the problem of dealing with entertainment directors who know nothing about comedy and couldn't care less. Indeed, he maintains that some of these directors are accountants and lawyers who are "far more interested in playing Trivial Pursuit or watching the playoffs than seeing a terrific comic. And in Florida, we're up against many retired comics who are willing to work for much less money than we are."
He adds, "Our greatest enemy is time. What everybody really wants is the new face."
Take My Wife…Please
Perhaps their material is dated. Indeed, Harris, Stone, and McGrath acknowledge that a line like "The reason I got married is because I wanted someone to finish my sentences" may not generate the big yuk it once did. Patter, no matter how delightfully delivered, about henpecked husbands, invasive in-laws, and demanding kids may be a tad stale.
Still, Stone insists that if the comedy is rooted in truth, "funny is funny."
The 65-year-old Stone, who has been in the business for 28 years, defines himself as a "talk comedian" in the spirit of Alan King and Buddy Hackett (before the latter's hallmark became four-letter words and vulgarity): "I don't do songs, improvisations, or sketches. I just talk, using my own life as my material. As my life has evolved, my material has evolved. What makes my act unique is my life. I'm a 65-year-old man with a 7-year-old daughter and I've been married to the same woman twice."
The eccentricity of his life notwithstanding, Stone suggests that everyone in the audience can relate to the feelings he evokes, if not the particulars of his experience. "The audiences are like participants at an AA meeting," Stone says. "Misery loves company and, as Alan King said, 'I don't have to change my material; I just change audiences.' "
Nevertheless, there are elements in his performance that have evolved with the changing times. Stone believes, for example, that audiences have become more homogenized and sophisticated. "Thanks to television, everyone is hip today. Everybody knows about the news," he says. "Everyone accepts ethnic differences and that the New York comic is a brash wise guy. He's not Bob Newhart. Years ago, we were told to delete all Jewish stuff for non-Jewish audiences for fear of stigmatizing ourselves as a Catskill comic. That's no longer the case.
"At the same time, I'm very careful to stay away from politics in a way that I wouldn't have been years ago," he continues. "I could make a light remark about Kennedy or Reagan. I can't about Bush. My feelings are too intense. I find nothing funny and there is the danger that I'd be imposing my views on an audience. A comic is not supposed to be a lecturer."
Stone contends that older comics were (and are) concerned with keeping an audience happy and entertained, if for no other reason than fear of not being hired again. "Many younger comics just don't care," he says. "They like to shock an audience. They do what's funny to them, knowing that they'll continue to find work at the comedy clubs."
Harris agrees with much of what Stone says, recalling that when he made a negative comment about the Iraq war on stage, he was heckled. He now avoids the topic. Harris also concedes that a degree of political correctness has crept into his act as a survival tactic.
"I'm very careful about what I say about women, for example," Harris says. "No more jokes about women. And I'm very careful about ethnic subjects." Unlike Stone, Harris does not point to himself as a Jew—or even talk about Jewish issues—in front of WASP audiences. And he painstakingly avoids offending any other ethnic group for whom he is performing.
His sense of fair play contributes to his reticence, but the need to continue working plays its role as well. It's hard enough to land a gig without offending anyone: "And even if you do very well, you may not get called back because the entertainment director for some reason doesn't like you. It's very hard to get hired at all if you don't have the right agent." He adds that the whole comedy world is more cutthroat than it once was: "Critics are crueler and so are agents, who often don't return calls."
Their Journeys
Whatever hard times these comics may be facing now, each one has had a following. Consider this: McGrath has performed for more than 200,000 people—from such towns as Laredo, Texas, to Silver Spring, Md., to Hollywood, Fla., to Steubenville, Ohio.
But comparatively speaking, he is a relative newcomer to the field, having performed on stage for a mere 20 years. For 40 years he worked in the Hackensack, N.J., school system, serving as dean of discipline in the high school; he was also the director of music at SUNY Maritime College at Fort Schuyler.
McGrath started doing comedy almost by accident. After he brought the legendary Smith & Dale vaudeville comedy team into his school to entertain the kids, he became friendly with the duo and was so taken with their routines that he mastered them. And then, when Charlie Dale died, he assumed the Dale role alongside Smith, playing Dr. Kronkite in the team's most famous skit. Ten years later, after Joe Smith passed on, McGrath launched his current Jewish humor act at various synagogues in northern New Jersey.
In fairness, it should be noted that neither the world of religion nor the world of Judaism was alien to him. His wife, a Jew, holds a graduate degree in bible studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary. McGrath's brother is a member of the Franciscan order and is presently stationed at St. Francis Church in New York City.
Stone and Harris began their careers more traditionally. When the Brooklyn-born Harris was growing up in the late '40s, his goal was twofold: to be Jack Benny and to escape his impoverished neighborhood. He studied acting formally and to this day observes that he would love to have been a legitimate actor if he felt he could have made a real living at it. Not pursuing a career in acting continues to be a major regret for him.
Like many of his generation, Harris honed his standup skills in the Catskills, beginning with five-minute bits. "If you could kill," he says, you'd get to perform longer gigs and later be invited to other hotels in the Catskills.
Harris recalls that much of his act—indeed, the acts of most beginners of that era—involved imitating the routines of stars. "I did Danny Kaye singing 'Dinah.' We all copied working comedians and stole from each other," he says. "But once you started working steadily, you couldn't do it anymore."
Stone's early years were not unlike those of Harris. He too grew up in Brooklyn in economically straitened circumstances and earned extra money by playing the drums at bar mitzvahs, weddings, and Catskill resorts, where he watched other comics perform and decided he could be funnier than they were. The social director at one hotel, who was a friend, gave him a shot on stage, and within short order he had a following.
Stone has spent much of his career as the opening act for such megastars as Frankie Valli, Sonny and Cher, Paul Anka, and Steve and Eydie, and he believes that "being an opening act is an art form all by itself. The audience has not come to see you, but the star. In some ways you're imposing yourself on that audience. The trick is to win them over. You have to do what you do very well, get the audience in a good humor, and set them up for the star."
Still, being an opening act to the main attraction—as lucrative as it may be—has to be frustrating at times, or so Stone suggests: "I could have been bigger and better. I wish I had majored in theatre in college and been more literate in my humor. If I had had more confidence, perhaps I could have been a producer. No one needs confidence like a standup comic. When he goes on stage, he is like a lion trainer. The lion knows when you're afraid and so does the audience."
Harris likens his experience on stage to being a gladiator, suggesting that the key is getting the audience on your side: "I see what I do as a kind of public service. I flatter the audience and make them feel intelligent. Of course, I have to gauge their intelligence first. I might say, 'Have you heard about the new organization DAM? That's Mothers Against Dyslexia.' I wait and see if they laugh. If they do, I take it from there. If not, I'll move the act in another direction."
The Changing Scene
Over the decades, the comics have learned the tricks of the trade—and some things have not changed. As an example, Harris has learned that the way to deal with the occasional heckler is to make him the villain, not the victim. "At one time I'd fight with them," he recalls. "Try to show the audience that I was in charge. I'd say things like 'You have great lines. But they're all on your face.' I soon realized, however, that by doing that I was turning the heckler into the underdog. The audience would side with him instead of me. So I now let the heckler talk, until the audience sees me as the underdog and tells the heckler to shut up."
But hecklers are no longer commonplace, and those few that remain are far less insulting than they used to be, say Harris and the others. Life on the road has also improved, with the better venues providing cars and good hotel suites. McGrath, Stone, and Harris all talk about how comforting television is, especially for the comedian traveling by himself for any length of time. A commonplace commodity like a television set was not offered years ago.
McGrath maintains that the quality of accommodations still varies with the venue and the agent booking the act: "I was performing in one elder hostel in Connecticut where I was expected to sleep with the dishwashers and eat what was left over after the guests were served. I refused to do it."
The age of a venue has bearing on its working (and sleeping) conditions. "Some of the old ones are pretty awful," says Harris. "I've slept in a barn and in a room the size of a closet, where the bathroom was across the hall and I had to wire up my own lights in order to have any. The dressing rooms—again, especially in the older places—can be terrible as well."
By contrast, the technology available on stage today, even at co-ops and condos, is pretty impressive, the comics insist. Indeed, some of these residences house retired theatre technicians who are eager to do the work, and do it well, for free.
But living on the road is challenging, more and more so with increasing age. "When you're young, it's all a lot of fun," says Stone. "It's different now. You're in a strange bed each night. The pillow is too hard or the mattress is too soft. You wake up and move to what you think is the bathroom and find you've peed in the closet." Beat. "I use that in my act. It's comedy. Everyone can identify with it."
Their Futures
So what does the future hold for our three comics? Stone talks with pride about being invited to Harvard this spring to address a class on Jewish humor. He will be bringing Freddie Roman and Robert Klein with him: "Years ago, Jews couldn't even get into Harvard." Stone is thrilled that comedy in general—Jewish comedy in particular—has gained such status. Still, there's sadness here. Stone and Roman (and, to a lesser extent, Klein) are very much of a bygone era. The sudden academic interest only underscores that fact.
Asked what he hopes to be doing in five years, Stone doesn't miss a beat: "I'd like to be alive. If there is no wood on either side of me, I'll be happy."
Harris echoes the sentiment, literally: "Hope I'm alive."
McGrath expects to be living. At least, he doesn't suggest thoughts to the contrary. Yet he concedes that the time has come to pack it in: "I'm going to be 80 next year. I think I'll retire. Look, I started performing—a new career—when I was 60!"
That's not a bad run at all.